Unangband 0.6.3 released

[andrewdoull]

I think that's a bug(?) in the dungeon.txt file. The entry for the Old Forest (N:8) has the "fill" feature, the third number in the "L:" lines, set to 0 for levels 7-9; this is used as an indicator for a small level in several places in the source, and seems to work not too well without the "TOWN" flag. I just changed those two lines to:

L:7:56:419:420:420:0:0:0:ROOMS | TUNNELS | LESS | MORE:a knoll in the
L:8:56:419:420:153:0:0:0:ROOMS | TUNNELS | LESS | MORE:Withywindle river in the

so I replaced the first 0 with 419 ("thicket") as filling feature, this seems to yield large, open, "foresty" dungeons as I think is indended for that area.

Good catch. I've committed this fix to svn.

[baddog73]

I just had a CTD with the compo-character, I was throwing a bolt at a snake. Sorry I can't provide more info.

-Ben

Edit: possible bug, also discovered running the compo. When nothing is wielded in the shooter slot, 'f' results in a throwing dialog. When I wield an instrument, 'f' results in a shooting dialog. So what is happening when I shoot an arrow while holding the guitar?

- There are still some minor bugs in the monster pluralization code.

- The description in the self knowledge for diseases is backwards. "You are affected by illweather caused by minor ailments." Maybe "You are affected by minor ailments caused by illweather." is right?

- I enountered a nasty bug on the second level of the Old Forest where I was offscreen and couldn't scroll the map to my location. It appears that no location in the old forest will allow scrolling. I'm not sure I can continue playing my char with this problem. NEVER MIND! I used the fix detailed in the above post.

- I can use mushrooms to coat my neck? When I look in my equipment after doing this I see e) around neck: intricate Woading <poison coated>. Is this supposed to happen?

- Bug: when you identify properties of a throwing item by using it, the item you just threw remains un-IDed.

- In one of the prereleases, you could buy a service of acid proofing in Hobbiton. It was a really nice feature for lower level characters who haven't found many ego/artifact items yet, but it appears to be gone.

- While in a shop, the term window with visible monsters/items shows odd things you can't really see.

[nooblet]

I can't download this from BerliOS. Is there any other way to acquire the file?

EDIT:
Never mind, it finally cooperated for me.

[baddog73]

Sorry, I'm not able to use Berlios to report bugs.

I wanted to start a new post to talk about throwing. Is everyone satisfied with how it works right now?

I was inspired by the compo character, whose throwing skills are excellent, to think about this. It seems as if a bolt 1d7 is a better throwing instrument than a dagger 1d4, which seems counter intuitive. Higher throwing skill gives greater to-hit, which makes sense to me.

Several things occur to me:
- Is the weight of the weapon figured into the damage? A thrown bolt seems a silly way to do business. It's so light that without the massive thrust of the crossbow to power it, it would not be very effective at all.
- "Throwing type" weapons will undoubtedly be more effective thrown weapons than, say, flails, but the damage dice say that game-wise this is not the case. Knives, darts, spears, harpoons, javelins, etc. IMHO should be more effective than others. The game already acknowledges this to some degree by letting you quiver those types.
- Thrown weapons "bend" IMHO too often. One effect of this is that it quickly makes a mess of your quiver when they no longer stack together. Also I would expect an exceptional or artifact item to be mostly immune to this type of damage. I.e. I usually say "oh crap" when I find 8 daggers of Westernesse, because I know that after a short while I'll have to devote the whole quiver to them as they unstack via bending damage. Very annoying since I have to get rid of anything else I'm saving in the quiver.

EDIT: to add a little weight to the argument:
1. in the LoTR book, the hobbits find some daggers {of Westernesse?} in the barrows, ages old, but eminently effective weapons because of their quality.
2. Throwing a weapon applies no greater force to a target than could be applied without releasing the weapon - meleeing doesn't "dull" your weapon, so why throwing?

If any of this is already implemented, then I apologize. I've never dived into the code. If there is more depth in the throwing code than I give credit to, then it simply is not apparent to me from playing the game. Thanks for the great variant!

-Ben

[andrewdoull]

- The description in the self knowledge for diseases is backwards. "You are affected by illweather caused by minor ailments." Maybe "You are affected by minor ailments caused by illweather." is right?

I could see an argument either way. In this instance, illweather is the disease you're suffering, and minor ailments is the source.

- I can use mushrooms to coat my neck? When I look in my equipment after doing this I see e) around neck: intricate Woading <poison coated>. Is this supposed to happen?

Woad provides passive protection. Approximately 1/6th of melee attacks against you will result in the attacker being poisoned (in this example).

- In one of the prereleases, you could buy a service of acid proofing in Hobbiton. It was a really nice feature for lower level characters who haven't found many ego/artifact items yet, but it appears to be gone.

You can sell books to shops to get services. In this example, the book with acid proofing was already stocked in the shop, so the service had been learnt. It's always possible to add the service though if you think it's worth it.

Everything else, I'll file bugs on behalf for you.

[andrewdoull]

I was inspired by the compo character, whose throwing skills are excellent, to think about this. It seems as if a bolt 1d7 is a better throwing instrument than a dagger 1d4, which seems counter intuitive.

It is counter intuitive. I'm going to do a blanket half damage on all ammunition if it's thrown instead of fired. This will halve the damage bonus as well... [Edit] While this resolves the issue with the normal ammunition types, higher level ammo is still too useful. I might have to do minimum damage instead of halving damage.

- "Throwing type" weapons will undoubtedly be more effective thrown weapons than, say, flails, but the damage dice say that game-wise this is not the case. Knives, darts, spears, harpoons, javelins, etc. IMHO should be more effective than others. The game already acknowledges this to some degree by letting you quiver those types.

You can also throw them further and more accurately.

- Thrown weapons "bend" IMHO too often. One effect of this is that it quickly makes a mess of your quiver when they no longer stack together. Also I would expect an exceptional or artifact item to be mostly immune to this type of damage. I.e. I usually say "oh crap" when I find 8 daggers of Westernesse, because I know that after a short while I'll have to devote the whole quiver to them as they unstack via bending damage. Very annoying since I have to get rid of anything else I'm saving in the quiver.

EDIT: to add a little weight to the argument:
1. in the LoTR book, the hobbits find some daggers {of Westernesse?} in the barrows, ages old, but eminently effective weapons because of their quality.
2. Throwing a weapon applies no greater force to a target than could be applied without releasing the weapon - meleeing doesn't "dull" your weapon, so why throwing?

The original problem was worse - we've (Bandobras and myself) have modified the code from where originally you'd lose the item completely, instead of "bending" it.

Having said that, I can see why you'd not want to have thrown items chip in this way (due to quiver management issues).

I could see an argument that we'd reliably chip all items the same way - by either penalizing to hit or damage consistently - so you'd just end up with two stacks: 1 pre-damage, and 1 post-damage. As long as you always threw the pre-damage stack, damaged items would always stack with the post-damage stack.

The obvious answer would be to always damage the higher of the two bonuses.

Andrew

[baddog73]

Thanks for the responses,

I could see an argument either way. In this instance, illweather is the disease you're suffering, and minor ailments is the source.

Maybe even better, "You are affected by illweather causing minor ailments." The old phraseology just bugs me, I guess; it's awkward.

Woad provides passive protection. Approximately 1/6th of melee attacks against you will result in the attacker being poisoned (in this example).

I learn something new every time I play...

You can sell books to shops to get services. In this example, the book with acid proofing was already stocked in the shop, so the service had been learnt. It's always possible to add the service though if you think it's worth it.

Ditto, cool.

More on the throwing issue:

I'm going to do a blanket half damage on all ammunition if it's thrown instead of fired.

Are you sure that's enough? I could see maybe all thrown arrows/bolts/shot being limited to 1d2 even they are so ineffective when thrown - only because by contrast the actual throwing type weapons have relatively low damage dice. No arrow no matter the quality should have higher dice than the lowly 1d4 dagger when thrown.

You can also throw them further and more accurately.

Perfect.

I could see an argument that we'd reliably chip all items the same way - by either penalizing to hit or damage consistently - so you'd just end up with two stacks: 1 pre-damage, and 1 post-damage. As long as you always threw the pre-damage stack, damaged items would always stack with the post-damage stack.

The obvious answer would be to always damage the higher of the two bonuses.

That would help, but I would still like to suggest getting rid of the damage altogether. IMHO throwing isn't a powerful combat skill anyway and might actually use a boost, the damage doesn't always make sense especially with artifacts and magical ego weapons, and it doesn't need to be more annoying by causing quiver inventory problems. Ye Gads, digging in granite walls doesn't even damage weapons.

Thanks very much for listening to my suggestions and rambling,

-Ben

EDIT: I've been playing my second Inyare a bit today, and I've begun to realize that once throwing arrows is rightfully nerfed throwing is going to be pretty weak. If I'd had to rely on what I'd found in this game that had the throwing flag, I'd not have used it to much effect. IMHO throwing needs a little boost to make it a fun secondary skill. The biggest problem is that there aren't enough things to throw. It might help if items with the throwing flag were more often found in larger piles than at present. This especially goes for ego items and randarts to keep it interesting in the later game. [plugging it again] Getting rid of throwing damage will allow the player to carry a full quiver of missiles [/plugging it again]

- bug: there's some kind of issue with stacking mushroom spores in the quiver and not automatically picking up types already quivered.

[Bodkin]

The [ (monlist command) should recentre you correctly (Let me know if it doesn't).

Alas, it does not recenter. I appreciate the effort, though, and I can wait for the next release if necessary.

Cheers,

[andrewdoull]

Alas, it does not recenter. I appreciate the effort, though, and I can wait for the next release if necessary.

Cheers,

Satyr's fix works for this, and you can download the dungeon.txt file incorporating the fix direct from SVN at http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/...it/dungeon.txt if you want...

[Bandobras]

I think the problem with throwing is, in part, psychological, that of perception.

1. There are many throws a round, but people often focus of the tiny damage of a single throw.

2. Each of the throws (with coated weapons) can inflict status effect on the monster, which is usually more useful to a warrior than damage. Moreover, you can choose the effect every time, as opposed to coating your primary weapon.

3. Even tiniest throwing weapons, like daggers or darts (or spikes or boots or whatever well-balanced junk can be coated, I've forgotten) does quite a bit of damage when coated even with flasks of oil.

4. For this particular character, with such great throwing skill and fighting ability, some other advantages of throwing are rarely seen. E.g. the flasks and spores (and lanterns, don't remember about torches) produce area effects, so monster AC is irrelevant, but this character hits always, anyway, so this might be useful perhaps only for Smeagol, other evasives and out of sight attacks.

5. Trick throws, virtually unused, which are quite useful with limited ammo and become especially useful once any single great throwing weapon is found, e.g. a *thanc.

[baddog73]

Thanks Bandobras. I'll have to keep working on understanding it better.

- more on the weird object embedded in walls bug: it only happens to head body parts.

- petrification by fear seems to last an inordinately long time - longer by far than the fear itself. Dang - no longer any rings of resist fear?

- problem: some trap zones are the same color as unknown space.

- bug: when reading a scroll from a magical bag, the letter designation of the main window list does not match the letter designation of the term window equipment display.

[Bodkin]

Satyr's fix works for this, and you can download the dungeon.txt file incorporating the fix direct from SVN at http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/...it/dungeon.txt if you want...

Outstanding -- the game just became playable again. Thanks!

[baddog73]

- "You are no longer hungry" messages when eating and already not hungry.

- sold an arrow, shop IDs it an arrow of slay man {+2,+3}. I buy it from the shop, and the {+2,+3} part is no longer IDed in my inventory.

- there's still something not right about the stacking of torches fuel. Bought a service of phlogiston and applied it to my unwielded torches stack. Then I go buy a torch w/2500 turns from the magic shop and end up with 6 torches 417 fuel. Numerical overflow maybe?

- after transitioning from night to day outside, strange field of view effects are seen.

- When taking IDed items from Bombadil's house, they revert to un-IDed.

- IMHO allies hatched from eggs don't last near long enough.

- allied giant silver ant: "A monster tries to cast a spell that has not yet been defined."

- seige engines and clockwork mechanisms seem to have no effect?

- No place to buy food in Rivendell! Almost a disaster for me. Unless later when I visited the chemist's shop he had lembas for sale. And elvish waybread for some reason doesn't get auto-eaten when travelling.

- Is there a racial affinity for certain weapons? If I (forge giant) wield a small sword I get x1, if I wield a trident I get x4.

[Obsilium]

The first level of Khazad-Dúm seems to have the same problem as the Old Forest levels had. Any suggestions for what to put there instead of the 0?

[thorgot]

- "You are no longer hungry" messages when eating and already not hungry.

- sold an arrow, shop IDs it an arrow of slay man {+2,+3}. I buy it from the shop, and the {+2,+3} part is no longer IDed in my inventory.

- there's still something not right about the stacking of torches fuel. Bought a service of phlogiston and applied it to my unwielded torches stack. Then I go buy a torch w/2500 turns from the magic shop and end up with 6 torches 417 fuel. Numerical overflow maybe?

- after transitioning from night to day outside, strange field of view effects are seen.

- When taking IDed items from Bombadil's house, they revert to un-IDed.

- IMHO allies hatched from eggs don't last near long enough.

- allied giant silver ant: "A monster tries to cast a spell that has not yet been defined."

- seige engines and clockwork mechanisms seem to have no effect?

- No place to buy food in Rivendell! Almost a disaster for me. Unless later when I visited the chemist's shop he had lembas for sale. And elvish waybread for some reason doesn't get auto-eaten when travelling.

- Is there a racial affinity for certain weapons? If I (forge giant) wield a small sword I get x1, if I wield a trident I get x4.

The items becoming unIDed thing seems to happen from any storehouse.

That multiplier is the charge bonus, I believe, so it is larger for heavier weapons. I'm still not clear on how charging works, but I've found that if I move a few spaces towards an enemy before attacking it counts as charging.